I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.
ADAM GOPNIKWe don’t know that we’ve lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
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We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
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Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.
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The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it.
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Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.
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The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.
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Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…
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The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers.
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After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility:
ADAM GOPNIK






